Social intelligence in academia: new studentships announced

Some of the most interesting and important work in social intelligence is happening in an academic context. In fact, many of the innovations and practices benefiting brands and businesses first started out as academic endeavours.

Here are some recently announced opportunities calling for the thinkers who will shape the future of social intelligence. Maybe that’s you?

Starting to Get the Picture:  Predicting Visual Social Media Content Success with Granular Visual Features

PhD studentship with Nottingham University Business School’s N/LAB

The project involves the development of predictive models based on different types of image features (e.g. objects, textures, geometry, layouts, colour palettes, typefaces) and image mining techniques, informed by practical knowledge on social media content strategy design, theorising from psychology and consumer psychology (e.g. processing fluency and decision heuristics), and state-of-the-art developments in computational social science and computer vision

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Creative AI as a medium in artistic and curatorial practice

PhD studentship wiith King’s College London in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries

The project explores new needs created by AI as a medium of artistic production. Art institutions play a crucial role in opening up the black box that currently is AI. They are places for exploring and reflecting the societal impact of this technology, and a critical but also creative response is urgent (Bucher 2018, House of Lords Select Committee for AI 2018, O’Neil 2016). Advanced technologies have had a transformational impact on the corporate world (Whittaker, Crawford, et al. 2018), while the cultural sector has been slow to acquire an adequate media literacy of the disruptive medium that is new AI. At the same time, the question of contemporary art ecology’s interface with technology has been noticed in media studies (Parisi 2013; Hui 2016), which regularly rely on and reflect art works to show the critical potential of the new media they inquire; it has also been noticed in art gallery studies (Paul 2009, Graham 2016).

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Our own Dr Jillian Ney entered the industry having completed a PhD in Social Media and Consumer Behaviour, where she explored how people evaluate the credibility of the information they find online and how this impacts their decision-making process in a live purchase decision.

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